Anthology 2. Luminous [1998, 2010]

by Greg Egan

  As we approached the hall, a small group of people filed in through the self-opening doors, giving me a brief glimpse of bodies silhouetted against swirling lights, and a blast of music. My anxiety began to seem absurd. Sally and Oliver were into psychedelics, that was all, and Herodotus’s founders had apparently decided to create a congenial environment in which to use them. I paid the sixty-dollar entry fee, smiling with relief.

  Inside, the walls and ceiling were ablaze with convoluted patterns: soft-edged multi-hued fractals pulsing with the music, like vast colour-coded simulations of turbulent fluids cascading down giant fret-boards at Mach 5. The dancers cast no shadows; these were high-power wall-screens, not projections. Stunning resolution – and astronomically expensive.

  Sally pressed a fluorescent-pink capsule into my hand. Harmony or Halcyon, maybe; I no longer knew what was fashionable. I tried to thank her and offer some excuse about ‘saving it for later’, but she didn’t hear a word, so we just smiled at each other meaninglessly. The hall’s sound insulation was extraordinary (which was lucky for the other villagers); I would never have guessed from outside that my brain was going to be puréed.

  Sally and Oliver vanished into the crowd. I decided to hang around for half an hour or so, then slip out and drive on to the motel. I stood and watched the people dancing, trying to keep my head clear despite the stupefying backdrops, though I doubted that I could learn much about the carrier that I didn’t already know. Probably under twenty-five. Probably not towing small children. Sally had given me all the details I needed to obtain information on Events from here to Memphis – past and future. The search was still going to be difficult, but at least I was making progress.

  A sudden loud cheer from the crowd broke through the music – and the room was transformed before my eyes. For a moment I was utterly disorientated, and even when the world began to make visual sense again, it took me a while to get the details straight.

  The wall-screens now showed dancers in identical rooms to the one I was standing in; only the ceiling continued to play the abstract animation. These identical rooms all had wall-screens themselves, which also showed identical rooms full of dancers … much like the infinite regress between a pair of mirrors.

  And at first, I thought the ‘other rooms’ were merely realtime images of the Herodotus dance hall itself. But the swirling vortex pattern on the ceiling joined seamlessly with the animation on the ceilings of ‘adjacent’ rooms, combining to form a single complex image; there was no repetition, reflected or otherwise. And the crowds of dancers were not identical, though they all looked sufficiently alike to make it hard to be sure, from a distance. Belatedly, I turned around and examined the closest wall, just four or five metres away. A young man ‘behind’ the screen raised a hand in greeting, and I returned the gesture automatically. We couldn’t quite make convincing eye contact – and wherever the cameras were placed, that would have been a lot to ask for – but it was, still, almost possible to believe that nothing really separated us but a thin wall of glass.

  The man smiled dreamily and walked away.

  I had goosebumps. This was nothing new in principle, but the technology here had been pushed to its limits. The sense of being in an infinite dance hall was utterly compelling; I could see no ‘furthest hall’ in any direction (and when they ran out of real ones, they could have easily recycled them). The flatness of the images, the incorrect scaling as you moved, and the lack of parallax (worst of all when I tried to peer into the ‘corner rooms’ between the main four, which ‘should’ have been possible, but wasn’t) served more to make the space beyond the walls appear exotically distorted than to puncture the effect. The brain actually struggled to compensate, to cover up the flaws – and if I’d swallowed Sally’s capsule, I doubt I would have been nit-picking. As it was, I was grinning like a child on a fairground ride.

  I saw people dancing facing the walls, loosely forming couples or groups across the link. I was mesmerised; I forgot all thoughts of leaving. After a while, I bumped into Oliver, who was swaying happily by himself. I screamed into his ear, ‘These are all other villages?’ He nodded, and shouted back, ‘East is east and west is west!’ Meaning … the virtual layout followed real geography – it just abolished the intervening distances? I recalled something James Springer had said in his Terminal Chat Show interview: We must invent a new cartography, to re-chart the planet in its newborn, protean state. There is no separation, now. There are no borders.

  Yeah … and the world was just one giant party. Still, at least they weren’t splicing-in live connections to war zones. I’d seen enough we-dance/you-dodge-shells ‘solidarity’ in the nineties to last a lifetime.

  It suddenly occurred to me: If the carrier really was travelling from Event to Event, then he or she was ‘here’ with me, right now. My quarry had to be one of the dancers in this giant, imaginary hall.

  And this fact implied no opportunity, let alone any kind of danger. It wasn’t as if Silver Fire carriers conveniently fluoresced in the dark. But it still felt like the strangest moment of a long, strange night: to understand that the two of us were finally ‘connected’, to understand that I’d ‘found’ the object of my search.

  Even if it did me no good at all.

  * * *

  Just after midnight – as the novelty was wearing off, and I was finally making up my mind to leave – some of the dancers began cheering loudly again. This time it took me even longer to see why. People started turning to face the east, and excitedly pointing something out to each other.

  Weaving through one of the distant crowds of dancers, in a village three screens removed, were a number of human figures. They might have been naked, some male, some female, but it was hard to be sure: they could only be seen in glimpses, and they were shining so brightly that most details were swamped in their sheer luminosity.

  They glowed an intense silver-white. The light transformed their immediate surroundings, though the effect was more like a halo of luminous gas, diffusing through the air, than a spotlight cast on the crowd. The dancers around them seemed oblivious to their presence, as did those in the intervening halls; only the people in Herodotus paid them the kind of attention their spectacular appearance deserved. I couldn’t yet tell whether they were pure animation, with plausible paths computed through gaps in the crowd, or unremarkable (but real) actors, enhanced by software.

  My mouth was dry. I couldn’t believe that the presence of these silver figures could be pure coincidence, but what were they meant to signify? Did the people of Herodotus know about the string of local outbreaks? That wasn’t impossible; an independent analysis might have been circulated on the net. Maybe this was meant as some kind of bizarre ‘tribute’ to the victims.

  I found Oliver again. The music had softened, as if in deference to the vision, and he seemed to have come down a little; we managed to have something approaching a conversation.

  I pointed to the figures – who were now marching smoothly straight through the image of the image of a wall-screen, proving themselves entirely virtual.

  He shouted, ‘They’re walking the Trail of Happiness!’

  I mimed incomprehension.

  ‘Healing the land for us! Making amends! Undoing the Trail of Tears!’

  The trail of tears? I was lost for a while, then a memory from high school surfaced abruptly. The ‘Trail of Tears’ was the brutal forced march of the Cherokee from what was now part of Georgia, all the way to Oklahoma, in the 1830s. Thousands had died along the way; some had escaped, and hidden in the Appalachians. Herodotus, I was fairly sure, was hundreds of kilometres from the historical route of the march, but that didn’t seem to be the point. As the silver figures moved across the dance floor twice-removed, I could see them spreading their arms wide, as if performing some kind of benediction.

  I shouted, ‘But what does Silver Fire have to do with—?’

  ‘Their bodies are frozen, so their spirits are free to walk the Trail of Happiness through cyb
erspace for us! Didn’t you know? That’s what Silver Fire is for! To renew everything! To bring happiness to the land! To make amends! ’ Oliver beamed at me with absolute sincerity, radiating pure goodwill.

  I stared at him in disbelief. This man, clearly, hated no one, but what he’d just spewed out was nothing but a New Age remix of the rantings of that radio evangelist, twenty years before, who’d seized upon AIDS as the incontrovertible proof of his own spiritual beliefs.

  I shouted angrily, ‘Silver Fire is a merciless, agonising—’

  Oliver tipped his head back and laughed, uproariously, without a trace of malice – as if I was the one telling ghost stories.

  I turned and walked away.

  The trail-walkers split into two streams as they crossed the hall immediately to the east of us. Half went north, half went south, as they ‘detoured around’ Herodotus. They couldn’t move among us, but this way the illusion remained almost seamless.

  And if I’d been drugged out of my skull? If I’d embraced the whole mythology of the Trail of Happiness and come here hoping to see it confirmed? In the morning, would I have half believed that the roaming spirits of Silver Fire patients had marched right past me?

  Bestowing their luminous blessing on the crowd.

  Near enough to touch.

  * * *

  I threaded my way towards the camouflaged exit. Outside, the cool air and the silence were surreal; I felt more disembodied and dreamlike than ever. I staggered towards the car park, and waved my notepad to make the hire car flash its lights.

  My head cleared as I approached the highway. I decided to drive on through the night; I was so agitated that I didn’t think I had much chance of sleeping. I could find a motel in the morning, take a shower, and catch a nap before my next appointment.

  I still didn’t know what to make of the Event – what solid link there could be between the carrier and the villagers’ mad syncretic cyberbabble. If it was nothing but coincidence, the irony was grotesque, but what was the alternative? Some ‘pilgrim’ on the Trail of Happiness, deliberately spreading the virus? The idea was ludicrous – and not just because it was unthinkably obscene. A carrier could only know that he or she had been infected if distinctive symptoms had appeared, but distinctive symptoms only marked the brutal end stage of the disease; a prolonged mild infection, if such a thing existed, would be indistinguishable from influenza. Once Silver Fire progressed far enough to affect the visible layers of the skin, the only options for cross-country travel all involved flashing lights and sirens.

  * * *

  At about half-past three in the morning, I switched on my notepad. I wasn’t exactly drowsy, but I wanted something to keep me alert.

  Ariadne had plenty.

  First, a heated debate on The Reality Studio – a program on the Intercampus Ideas Network. A freelance zoologist from Seattle named Andrew Feld spoke first, putting the case that Silver Fire ‘proved beyond doubt’ his ‘controversial and paradigm-subverting’ S-force theory of life, which ‘combined the transgressive genius of Einstein and Sheldrake with the insights of the Maya and the latest developments in superstrings, to create a new, life-affirming biology to take the place of soulless, mechanistic Western science’.

  In reply, virologist Margaret Ortega from UCLA explained in detail why Feld’s ideas were superfluous, failed to account for – or clashed directly with – numerous observed biological phenomena, and were neither more nor less ‘mechanistic’ than any other theory which didn’t leave everything in the universe to the whim of God. She also ventured the opinion that most people were capable of affirming life without casually discarding all of human knowledge in the process.

  Feld was a clueless idiot on a wish-fulfilment trip. Ortega wiped the floor with him.

  But when the nationwide audience of students voted, he was declared winner by a majority of two to one.

  Next item: Protesters were blockading the Medical Research Laboratories of the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, calling for an end to Silver Fire research. Safety was not the issue. Protest organiser and ‘acclaimed cultural agitator’ Kid Ransom had held an impromptu press conference:

  ‘We must reclaim Silver Fire from the grey, small-minded scientists, and learn to tap its wellspring of mythical power for the benefit of all humanity! These technocrats who seek to explain everything are like vandals rampaging through a gallery, scrawling equations on all the beautiful works of art!’

  ‘But how will humanity ever find a cure for this disease, without research?’

  ‘There is no such thing as disease! There is only transformation!’

  There were four more news stories, all concerning (mutually exclusive) proclamations about the ‘secret truth’ (or secret ineffability) behind Silver Fire, and maybe each one, alone, would have seemed no more than a sad, sick joke. But as the countryside materialised around me – the purple-grey ridge of the Black Mountains to the north starkly beautiful in the dawn – I was slowly beginning to understand. This was not my world any more. Not in Herodotus, not in Seattle, not in Hamburg or Montreal or London. Not even in New York.

  In my world, there were no nymphs in trees and streams. No gods, no ghosts, no ancestral spirits. Nothing – outside our own cultures, our own laws, our own passions – existed in order to punish us or comfort us, to affirm any act of hatred or love.

  My own parents had understood this perfectly, but theirs had been the first generation to be so free of the shackles of superstition. And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious to any child, even though it went against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.

  We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children: science, history, literature, art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn’t fought hard enough to pass on the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent.

  Maybe, in the West, we’d delivered the death blows to the old doctrinal religions, the old monoliths of delusion, but that victory meant nothing at all.

  Because taking their place now, everywhere, was the saccharine poison of spirituality.

  * * *

  I checked into a motel in Asheville. The parking lot was full of campervans, people heading for the national parks; I was lucky, I got the last room.

  My notepad chimed while I was in the shower. An analysis of the latest data reported to the Centres for Disease Control showed the ‘anomaly’ extending almost two hundred kilometres further west along the I-40 – about halfway to Nashville. Five more people on the Trail of Happiness. I sat and stared at the map for a while, then I dressed, packed my bag again, and checked out.

  I made ten calls as I was driving up into the mountains, cancelling all my appointments with relatives from Asheville to Jefferson City, Tennessee. The time had passed for being cautious and methodical, for gathering every last scrap of data along the way. I knew the transmission had to be taking place at the Events; the only question was whether it was accidental or deliberate.

  Deliberate how? With a vial full of fibroblasts, teeming with Silver Fire? It had taken researchers at the NIH over a year to learn how to culture the virus – and they’d only succeeded in March. I couldn’t believe that their work had been replicated by amateurs in less than three months.

  The highway plunged between the lavish wooded slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains, following the Pigeon River most of the way. I programmed a predictive model – by voice – as I drove. I had a calendar for the Events, now, and I had five approximate dates of infection. Case notifications would always be too late; the only way to catch up was to extrapolate. And I could only assume that the carrier would continue moving steadily westwards, never linge
ring, always travelling on to the next Event.

  I reached Knoxville around midday, stopped for lunch, then drove straight on.

  The model said: Pliny, Saturday 14 Jan., 9.30 p.m. My first chance to search the infinite dance hall for the carrier, without an impassable wall between us.

  My first chance to be in the presence of Silver Fire.

  * * *

  I arrived early, but not so early as to attract the attention of Pliny’s equivalents of Sally and Oliver. I stayed in the car for an hour, improvising ways to look busy, recording the licence numbers of arriving vehicles. There were a lot of four-wheel drives and utilities, and a few campervans. Many villagers favoured bicycles, but the carrier would need to have been a real fanatic – and extremely fit – to have cycled all the way from Greensboro.

  The Event followed much the same pattern as the one in Herodotus the night before, though Herodotus itself wasn’t taking part. The crowd was similar, too: mostly young, but with enough exceptions to keep me from looking completely out of place. I wandered around, trying to commit every face to memory without attracting too much attention. Had all these people swallowed the Silver Fire myth, as I’d heard it from Oliver? The possibility was almost too bleak to contemplate. The only thing that gave me any hope was that when I’d compared the number of villages listed on the Event calendar with the number in the region, it was less than one in twenty. The microvillage movement itself had nothing to do with this insanity.

  Someone offered me a pink capsule – not for free, this time. I gave her twenty dollars, and pocketed the drug for analysis. There was a slender chance that someone was passing out doctored capsules, although stomach acid tended to make short work of the virus.

  A handsome blond kid barely in his twenties hovered around me for a while as the trail-walkers appeared. When they’d vanished into the west, he approached me, took my elbow, and made an offer I couldn’t quite hear over the music, though I thought I got the gist of it. I was too distracted to feel amazed or flattered, let alone tempted, and I got rid of him in five seconds flat. He walked away looking wounded, but not long afterwards I saw him leaving with a woman half my age.